


best of three

by sheliesshattered (glasscannon)



Series: a revolution in bedsharing [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars: Rebellion Era - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Cassian's POV, Cuddling & Snuggling, F/M, Hoth (Star Wars), Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Multi, Platonic Cuddling, Pre-Poly, Pre-ship, Sharing a Bed, cozy crack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-02-01 06:21:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21415327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscannon/pseuds/sheliesshattered
Summary: Jyn hummed low in her throat, something almost approaching a purr, and Bodhi dragged the comb through her hair in long slow movements, his mouth half hitched up in a smile that Cassian could see from the corner of his eye. That soft quiet descended again, just their breath, the whisper of the comb, the tap of their fingertips on their datapads, the scuff of his hand against Jyn’s socks.And slowly, slowly, Cassian’s shoulders uncoiled.The bedsharing on Hoth continues.
Relationships: Cassian Andor & Jyn Erso & Bodhi Rook, Cassian Andor & K-2SO, Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso/Bodhi Rook
Series: a revolution in bedsharing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1543792
Comments: 1
Kudos: 56





	best of three

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally meant as the first chapter and a half of a much longer work. I doubt I will ever finish the longer story, but I realized that this first chunk stands pretty well all on its own, and thought a few of you out there might enjoy it. I would love to hear your thoughts! <3

It started with small things. 

(It was too late before he knew it.)

That first day, he returned to his room at midday to find that Jyn and Bodhi had left their blankets behind. Someone — probably Bodhi — had neatly folded all three sets of blankets at the foot of his bed, and they were now stacked one on the next in an almost ostentatiously tall tower that drew Cassian’s eye the moment he walked through the door.

He dropped his datapad and lunch on the desk and sank into the desk chair, staring hard at the blankets. Their positioning practically screamed _Jyn_, the tower’s angle relative to the door like a tilt of her head, _ so what do you think of this? _ But the mere fact of their presence was by far the more concerning issue. Clearly, they meant to return tonight, meant to take him up on his half-sarcastic offer. And clearly, they had discussed it, the two of them, after he left.

_ So what do you think of this? _

Cassian didn’t have an answer to that, not anything easily encapsulated in words, in any case. He stood and arranged the blankets into a row along the foot of the bed, squared with the mattress, then sat at his desk, back resolutely to the bed, and paged through the reports on his datapad and tried to eat his lunch before it got cold.

They were both waiting for him when he returned from his last briefing late that evening, the base lights already shifting to night mode, Bodhi’s hair loose and Jyn flushed pink from a shower, laughing as they spread the blankets over the bed. It wasn’t until he was settled between them in the darkness, after the last rearranging of pillows and shuffling of limbs, when he was on the edge of sleep, that it occurred to him that the feeling of easy rightness at finding them waiting for him was more than familiarity, more than a holdover of their time in the field together, more than the relief he would feel at seeing his team alive and well at the end of a mission. He drifted to sleep trying to find what that feeling was _ less than_.

* * *

When he returned to his room for lunch the next day, the bed greeted him with three sets of blankets neatly squared along the foot and three pillows neatly lining the head. He liked the symmetry, he decided in a distracted sort of way, and turned his focus to the pile of reconnaissance holovids that needed his attention.

* * *

Half a dozen days passed before Cassian managed to arrive back at his— their— his room in the evening before either Jyn or Bodhi. Six days in and it was almost strange to return to empty quarters, the lights flickering on at his entrance, illuminating the wide bed and its three matched sets of pillows and blankets. Stifling his initial surge of emotion out of habit, Cassian went about his pre-sleep routine. He wasn’t _ disappointed _ exactly, and with the continued presence of their blankets, he had no doubt they would show up eventually. It was just — it was too quiet, he decided, grabbing his refresher kit and heading to the men’s ‘fresher down the hall.

His quarters were still empty when he returned, the bed looking too wide and stark in the evening lighting, its corners too crisp in the silence. Cassian hesitated a moment, then reached for the nearest set of folded blankets — Bodhi’s — and shook the double layer of wool blanket and down quilt out to their full size, wide enough for one person to wrap up in and not much more. They had yet to settle into a routine sleeping arrangement, the three of them, but more often than not Bodhi took the outside edge with his back to the door, so Cassian spread his blankets there, overhanging the edge of the mattress and reaching halfway across it, as he tried to keep his mind from calling up every bit of field knowledge about what it might mean for someone to sleep between the door and the rest of their squad, as if shielding them. 

Jyn’s blankets were next over, Cassian’s own set snug between hers and the wall, and he had to turn sideways to squeeze through the narrow space between the foot of the bed and the wardrobe to reach his blankets. He shook them out, wool over down, and spread them beside the wall, the outer third overlapping Bodhi’s blankets, then turned to Jyn’s quilts. He grabbed the corners and gave a flick of his wrists to send the layered blankets airborne and flaring to their full size — and as he did, something roughly the size of a grenade flew through the air, bounced noiselessly off the desk, then hit the ground and rolled under the foot of the bed.

Not actually a grenade, clearly, but Cassian still had to take conscious control over his breathing as he bent down to retrieve the hidden object. He groped a moment under the bed before his fingers brushed something soft, and he pulled it out to examine it. A pair of thick woolen socks, rolled together into an irregular ball. Not his, but then neither were the last blankets he’d shaken out.

Cassian was just standing and turning back to where he’d left Jyn’s blankets slightly rumpled on top of his and Bodhi’s when the pad beside the door lit up, and a half a moment later the door whooshed open to reveal Bodhi striding in, coat and boots over his sleepclothes. His expression lit up when he saw Cassian, then crumpled slightly in guilt.

“Cassian, you’re here already!” he said, easily altering his course to pull Cassian into a brief hug. Bodhi glanced at the chrono on his wrist as he shuffled past Cassian to the wardrobe. “Or, no, actually, we’re just running that late. Sorry about that, we got caught up talking with Baze and Chirrut and Skywalker. I think Jyn’s planning on hitting the women’s refresher before she comes to bed,” he added, shrugging out of his coat and hanging it in the wardrobe alongside Cassian’s own.

It wasn’t exactly a new thing — it wasn’t at all a new thing — but it was the first time Cassian had been there to see Bodhi hang his coat up, the quiet domesticity of the moment striking him as all the more poignant for the ease of Bodhi’s motions in the soft evening light.

Cassian forced his gaze down to his hands and the pair of socks he still held, forced himself to gather his thoughts. “It’s nothing,” he said in response to Bodhi’s apology, after a pause perhaps half a second too long. “It’s not like I was already asleep.”

They had both been asleep by the time he got back to his room two nights ago. Cassian still felt bad about that. But Bodhi just smiled at him and gripped his shoulder as he squeezed past him again on the way towards the head of the bed.

“Not yours, I take it?” Cassian asked, tracking his movements and waving the rolled socks as the other man paused by the desk to take his hair from its ponytail.

“What?” Bodhi turned back to him. “Oh, no, that’s— those are Jyn’s extra sleep socks. But you might wanna,” he pantomimed putting them down on the bed. “She’s kinda weirdly particular about her socks,” he added, left hand drifting towards his temple for just a moment before he turned away again.

It was the smallest of tells, but one that Cassian had seen from Bodhi before: something had reminded him of Saw Gerrera. Cassian was suddenly coldly certain that Gerrera had done something to Jyn, put her through something, to make her so _ weirdly particular about her socks_. His hand had unconsciously curled into a fist around the soft squish of the socks, and he had to draw a calming breath in through his nose to loosen his fingers.

The datapad on the wall lit again, and Bodhi laughed, turning to grab for Jyn’s blankets. “You might wanna stand back for this part,” he said, unfurling her quilts in front of him and holding them open with both hands, widening his stance and dropping into a slight crouch just as the door slid open. Jyn barely gave it time to open all the way before she was streaking into the room in a blur of towels and coats and sleepclothes, her smile wide as she barrelled straight into Bodhi’s waiting arms.

Cassian did step back then, as Bodhi quickly transferred Jyn’s forward motion into lifting her off her feet and depositing her, blankets and all, onto the bed, their laughter mingling over the scuffle of cloth on cloth. He couldn’t help but smile a little at their antics, especially when Bodhi caught his eye and grinned.

Jyn rolled over, twisting her blankets around her, and pushed into a sitting position. “Did you see where my socks ended up?” she asked Bodhi. “I can already feel the warmth of the shower leaving my toes.”

Bodhi barely got through a stuttered, “Oh, uh...” and a quick look in his direction before Jyn’s gaze had zeroed in on the ball of socks still clasped in Cassian’s right hand.

He nearly expected the booming clang of blast doors closing with how quickly and completely her expression shuttered. 

“Cassian, I didn’t realize you were back already,” she said with false lightness and no particular emotion on her face. “May I have my socks, please?” She extricated an arm from her swaddling of blankets and reached out her hand for the bundle, holding his gaze, expectant and hard around the edges.

_ Weirdly particular about her socks_. For a brief second, he wanted to bring Saw Gerrera back from the dead just so he could punch him in the face and stuff his socks full of Hoth ice, but Cassian pushed it from his mind, finding focus in the sharp line of Jyn’s jaw. “Of course. Just, uh,” he scrambled, summoning up a smile more charming than his usual and briskly rubbing the rolled socks between his hands, “warming these up for you.”

She raised her eyebrows at that and watched him impassively for a moment. “Well go on, then,” she said, shifting and holding out one booted foot to him, just as Bodhi looked ready to step in himself.

Cassian kept his gaze on Jyn’s and quirked a brow in response. It was always one step further with her, one more test to pass, her instincts against trust running even deeper than Cassian’s. Not that he could say he blamed her — or even really minded, when it came right down to it, he realized, as he let his smile slide into something more genuine. He perched on the edge of the bed, just close enough to pull her foot into his lap. She let him, but he could feel the tension in her calf muscle, see it in the line of her back through the blankets.

“Bodhi said you two got caught up talking to Skywalker,” Cassian said by way of distraction, unrolling Jyn’s extra pair of socks and handing one to Bodhi when the other man held out his hand. “What did he want?”

“Still looking to move over to Rogue Squadron,” she said, her voice deceptively calm and her gaze shifting between the two of them, as Bodhi knelt beside the bed and began to gently pry Jyn’s other boot loose. “Then Baze and Chirrut joined us and talk turned to using Force sensitivities in battle.”

She rolled her eyes, but Cassian caught her gaze and smiled a little. “You doubt the Force?” he asked. “With Chirrut, everything we’ve seen, all the times we’ve survived against the odds?” The buckles on her boot were strange from his angle, and while he worked them free he cast a quick glance at Bodhi, who had loosened Jyn’s other boot but left it on her foot as he rolled the sock he held down to its toe. Cassian did the same, trying to mimic Bodhi’s work while keeping his eyes mostly on Jyn.

Inside her cocoon of blankets, her hand had found its way to the crystal she wore at her neck, if Cassian was any judge. “Of course I _ believe_,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with Skywalker’s idea to build tactics around it.”

Cassian watched as Bodhi caught Jyn’s gaze, waiting for her confirming nod before he quickly pulled her boot off, leaving the sock she already wore in place, and then rolled the second sock over top of the first, and tucked the cuff of her sleep-thermals into the top edge. Bodhi wrapped both hands around Jyn’s foot, scuffing his palms against her socks to generate warmth and all but obscuring her small foot in his grasp. Beside Cassian, Jyn released a small breath through her nose, her posture relaxing by a fraction.

Maybe it was more the cold, then, and not the sock itself, Cassian thought, watching Jyn smile crookedly at Bodhi, glad now that he had followed the other man’s lead. Whatever it was that Gerrera had put her through, it had clearly left a mark. He pressed the fingertips of one hand gently into Jyn’s calf in what he hoped was a reassuring way, and felt the muscle ease beneath his touch. When he looked up, Jyn was watching him, eyes still guarded.

“Ready?” he asked softly, one hand on her boot and the other still on her calf. At her nod, he quickly slid the boot from her foot and retrieved the sock from his lap, rolling it on as Bodhi had the other. It took Cassian perhaps a few seconds longer than Bodhi, but when he had the second sock in place, he pressed his thumb to the arch of Jyn’s foot and felt the tension bleed from her.

On the floor at his feet, Bodhi met his gaze, smiling at him as he shifted his grip to massage Jyn’s other foot as well, still engulfed in his hands. Cassian smiled back, fairly certain his attempt at turning it into a smirk had failed spectacularly. He was as helpless as ever in the face of Bodhi’s happiness. Bodhi smiled and Cassian had no choice but be swept away with him.

When Cassian rubbed small circles into the sole of her foot, Jyn leaned back on her elbows, dropping her head back and biting off something that sounded suspiciously like a groan. “Oh yeah, that’s the stuff,” she said, clearly trying to make it sound like a joke, but her cadence was all wrong, breath hitching in the middle.

“Never realize how uncomfortable those snow-boots are until you have them off, huh?” Bodhi asked, sympathetic laughter in his voice.

“Never realize how much I miss— miss my old boots until those horrid things are off,” she replied, stuttering over her words as Cassian shifted his fingers and pressed into a particularly tight tendon; he made himself stifle the triumphant grin that tried to spread across his face. “Thankfully there’s always off-world missions to remind me what footwear _ should _ be,” she added, cutting the last word short around what was quite definitely another groan. 

She hauled her head back upright to look at them both down the length of her body, and Cassian met her gaze from beneath his brows, chin tucked toward his chest, kneading her heel and idly cataloguing her reactions. Her breathing had definitely sped, and her eyes looked too dark even for the dimness of the room. “Careful,” she said around a well-disguised sharp intake of breath, watching them intently, “a girl could get used to this.”

He could get used to her looking at him like that. 

The thought was there and gone before Cassian had a chance to censor it, while Bodhi just laughed and shook his head. “Get used to being treated well?” he asked. “You’re right, that would be terrible, we can’t have that.” Bodhi gave her foot one more squeeze then pushed himself to standing, dropping an almost absent-minded kiss at the edge of Jyn’s hairline. She looked up at him, smiling and flushed, then cut her gaze to Cassian, meeting his eyes until Bodhi nudged her to scoot over.

He wished he could have the ease with her Bodhi had always seemed to have. He wished he could crawl up her body and kiss her breathless, he realized in the same moment, the unfamiliar tingling rush of it sweeping across him from crown to toes.

“Datapads in bed tonight, or straight to lights out?” Bodhi asked as he helped Jyn shuffle out of her coat, unwind herself from her blankets and squirm under the double layer of bedding at the center of the bed, before spreading her blankets out over top.

Jyn wrinkled her nose and propped her pillow up against the headboard. “I have a report I need to finish writing, should have had it to Commander Organa yesterday. I vote datapads.”

Cassian had yet to move from his perch near the foot of the bed, waiting for the goosebumps from his realization to subside before he trusted his voice, but when Bodhi glanced to him, eyebrows raised in question, he managed a nod and a shrug that at least felt like it looked nonchalant. “Always more reconnaissance holovids to review,” he said, keeping his voice low and even. He stood and crossed the small space to the desk to retrieve his datapad from the drawer, his back to Jyn and Bodhi for the brief moment of recovery it allowed.

“Hand me mine too, would you?” Jyn asked, wiggling around until she was sitting against the headboard, three layers of wool blankets and down quilts pulled up to high on her chest. “I stashed it in there before dinner.”

Cassian looked down at the drawer with some consternation, but there was indeed a second datapad, clearly not his. He retrieved both and looked up at Bodhi’s approach; the other man reached into the drawer and pulled out a wide-tooth comb from near the back, tapping it once against the stacked datapads and offering Cassian a small crooked smile before he turned back towards the bed. Also quite definitely not Cassian’s comb, and he squashed the sudden urge to search the entire room for other objects that didn’t belong to him.

“Alright, Andor, we’re all waiting on you now,” Jyn said from her spot centered against the headboard, mock severity covering over a steady happiness in her voice, and he looked up to find that Bodhi had climbed beneath the covers beside Jyn, and they were both sitting with their knees pulled up, to give Cassian space to crawl past at the foot of the bed.

He grumbled a little as he climbed onto the bed, mostly to see the upturned corner of Jyn’s mouth as he maneuvered himself into the space left between her and the wall.

“If you didn’t want to crawl over everyone, you should have been first in bed,” she said, that corner of her mouth curling further in self-satisfied pleasure as she held her hand out for her datapad, the line of her shoulders relaxed and easy against her pillow.

Cassian slipped beneath his blankets and settled beside her, then handed her the extra datapad, flicking his gaze to Bodhi on her far side. The other man had turned his body slightly towards them, right shoulder braced against the headboard and his legs curled beneath him, half in Jyn’s lap, as he pulled the comb through his long hair. Bodhi met his gaze, smiling again in a way that made his eyes crinkle and his mouth come to life. Cassian was smiling back at him before he’d given his face permission to move, so he directed his gaze back down to his datapad and tried to focus on the holovids he needed to work through.

For a few minutes there was a soft quiet, blankets rustling, the three of them breathing, Bodhi pulling the comb through his hair in a slow, calm rhythm. It faded to a pleasant white noise, something like being in the mess hall when the base was in good spirits, or the quiet creak of a ship in hyperspace carrying no one but Cassian and Kaytoo, or one candle burning and his mother’s voice by his bedside — sharp when he tried to examine it, gently supportive when he let it be. He allowed it to wrap around him, cloak him, and gave his full focus to the details of the holovids Draven had marked for his attention.

They made it perhaps ten minutes before Jyn dropped her datapad into her lap in disgust. “If I’d known there would be _ this _much pointless writing in the Alliance I might have thought twice about joining up after Scarif,” she grumbled. 

“No you wouldn’t’ve,” Bodhi replied immediately, smiling down at her. She elbowed him affectionately. 

“Why do we even have to _ write _ reports?” she continued, wrinkling her nose. “We proceeded as planned, completed our mission as instructed, and returned to base with all assets intact. Why should I take _ six pages _ to say that?”

“You’re not writing for Mothma,” Cassian said absentmindedly, scrolling back the timestamp on the holovid he was watching by a few seconds to rewatch an interaction in slow motion. “Or the Council. Commander Organa prefers clipped language and limited contextual info. Only go into detail if something out of the ordinary catches your attention, a routine mission could easily come in under three pages.”

He could _ feel _the look Jyn was giving him, and against his better judgement glanced up at her to confirm the unamused expression on her face: brows lowered, lips pressed, jaw cocked slightly to one side, gaze intent on his face. 

“I’ll just cut this down by half then, shall I?” she said, sarcasm a flat tone from her.

On her other side, Bodhi nudged her shoulder. “Would it help if I comb your hair while you work on it?” he asked.

Jyn turned her head slowly to look at him, expression set and jaw firm for a long moment, even as the corners of her eyes began to crinkle. “It might, yes,” she said with false severity. “_Thank you_, Bodhi,” she added in a way that clearly contained _ for being helpful when Cassian won’t. _He flashed her a smirk and turned back to the holovid, running it forward frame by frame.

Beside him, Jyn shifted around so her back was angled more towards Bodhi, reaching up to pull her hair from its customary bun. She stretched her legs out beneath the covers, toes knocking into Cassian’s knees a few times before he finally reached under and pulled her socked feet into his lap. The holovid had the majority of his attention, his eyes tracking a sleight of hand from one frame to the next as an asset palmed a datacard and passed a fake off as the real thing, but with his free hand he idly rubbed Jyn’s feet, pressing his thumb to her arches and finding her toes through two layers of socks.

Jyn hummed low in her throat, something almost approaching a purr, and Bodhi dragged the comb through her hair in long slow movements, his mouth half hitched up in a smile that Cassian could see from the corner of his eye. That soft quiet descended again, just their breath, the whisper of the comb, the tap of their fingertips on their datapads, the scuff of his hand against Jyn’s socks. 

And slowly, slowly, Cassian’s shoulders uncoiled.

* * *

He woke languidly the next morning, coming to consciousness in stages, awareness filtering in slowly. Cassian found himself curled around Jyn’s back as she lay with her head on Bodhi’s chest, his right arm draped across her waist, his fingers lightly tangled with Bodhi’s left resting on the other man’s hip, and Bodhi’s right hand settled on the top of Cassian’s head, loose with sleep. He couldn’t remember the last time he had slept so well, nor so deeply, even on-base, and lying there warm and comfortable, Cassian could feel sleep threatening to pull him under again. But there was a day ahead to tackle, responsibilities that were his no matter how well or poorly he slept, a revolution that only moved forward under continuous cooperative effort, so he forced his eyes open and tried to banish the remaining sleep from his mind.

As soon as he started to shift, Jyn made a small noise of protest deep in her throat, and Cassian felt the vibrations of it where his chest was pressed to her back. “It’s our day off,” she muttered drowsily into Bodhi’s shirt. “Go back to sleep.” She must have felt him tensing to move because she reached back and tangled her right leg with his, thermal scuffing on thermal. “Stay. Sleep.”

He had forgotten it was their day off, actually, but now that she had pointed it out, it was as if his body had already moved on to the next step, coaxing him back towards sleep. He relaxed against Jyn, let her pull his arm more snugly around her. “Yes, ma’am,” he whispered, sleepily tucking his nose into the loose hair at the back of her head. Across from him, Bodhi opened one eye lazily, met his gaze and smiled, then threaded his fingers through Cassian’s hair as they all drifted back to sleep.

* * *

Sitting in front of Commander Organa twenty-four hours later, Cassian was glad he’d let Jyn talk him into sleeping in. They were headed off-base on a mission, he and Jyn and Bodhi and Kaytoo, to a planet in the Mid-Rim. One of the Partisan contacts they had carefully cultivated over the last year had sent the Alliance the code that meant _ Imperial defector(s), extraction required_. The four of them were the obvious choice for the task, the most likely team to pull off a mission requiring this much improvisation without blowing cover or creating more casualties than necessary. But at the news that Alliance Command expected this to take them three, maybe four days to complete, Cassian caught the subtle shift in Jyn’s jaw, the brightness of her eyes at the prospect of time away from Hoth, and he knew he would have fought to get this mission if he’d had to.

They were cleared for departure just before noon, after spending the morning packing their freighter with the supplies needed for the mission, along with the usual extra should things go sideways. Their clunky old CEC XS-1000 still felt like the home they’d made it in the time since the Alliance Fleet left Yavin IV, their modifications to the small corvette ship evident in every room, their field gear still stashed in the storage lockers, the ramps still creaking in the same places — and yet it felt to Cassian as though they had been away far longer than the nine days that had passed since they'd disembarked on Hoth.

That he had hardly seen Kay since arriving on Hoth made the time seem that much longer. Cassian had known that K-2SO would be called on to help move the Alliance into the new base, nearly every large droid he’d seen in the last week occupied in ferrying items from the Alliance Fleet to their new locations on base, Kay among them. Kaytoo had followed Cassian to his room that first night on Hoth but had been gone by morning, and since then Cassian had barely seen Kay from one day to the next. He passed the droid in the cargo bay on his way to the cockpit, and rested a hand on his old friend’s chassis in greeting before continuing on, momentarily intensely grateful to have Kay back at his side.

Cassian settled into the copilot’s chair as Bodhi went through the last of the pre-flight checklist, pulling up the navigation interface to verify their departure trajectory. Behind him, Jyn strapped herself into the open seat at the communications computer for liftoff, and Kaytoo finished the final check of the cargo bay before joining them in the cockpit, the four of them falling back into their old routine without so much as a word, moving past each other in comfortable, companionable silence.

As Bodhi expertly eased their ship out of the hangar doors and away from Echo Base, Cassian could feel the familiar stress creeping up on him, as well-worn as the rest of their routines. It had always been a conflicting thing: On the one hand, he hated when Jyn or Bodhi went into the field without him, hated not being there to have their back. But at the same time, having them in the field with him added an extra layer of tension to his shoulders, an additional suspicious itch at the back of his neck. It would worsen once they were planetside, he knew, and not really abate until they were all back on base, safe and sound. It was the price he paid to have Jyn and Bodhi with him.

When they cleared Hoth’s atmosphere and the ship’s artificial gravity engaged, from the corner of his eye Cassian saw Jyn lean forward against her seat’s restraints, across the communications dashboard to press her hand to the side viewport still showing the bright white curve of Hoth. He didn’t look up from the nav computer, but the force of her motions made him think she probably wasn’t bidding a tearful farewell to their new home.

“It is illogical to direct a rude gesture at an entire planet, Jyn Erso,” Kay said from his seat behind Cassian, confirming his suspicions.

“Not if it’s this planet, it’s not,” Jyn replied, continuing to hold her hand up to the viewport even as Bodhi threw the lever to send them into hyperspace.

“Are you unhappy there?” Kaytoo asked, after the sort of pause that told Cassian he was trying to integrate new information, despite the sharp sarcasm in his voice.

Jyn finally dropped her hand, looked away from the window and over at the droid. “I’m _ cold _ there,” she replied.

“Yes, you are,” Kay agreed, then stood and left the cockpit for the cargo hold, his heavy footsteps on the metal ramps lingering behind him.

“Every time I think that bucket of bolts is finally growing on me...” Jyn muttered when he had gone, releasing her seatbelts to come stand in the space between Cassian’s seat and Bodhi’s.

“He means well,” Cassian replied, not looking up from his preparations to wipe Hoth from the nav computer, and privately pleased with how much defensiveness he’d been able to keep out of his tone.

“And he’s not wrong, is he?” Bodhi asked, looking up from his computer and glancing at Jyn, laughter in his voice.

“Hey, I can be both cold _ and _happy,” she said, shoving Bodhi’s shoulder fondly. “I can multitask, I’m talented that way.”

“Are you, then?” Cassian asked before he could stop himself. “Happy?”

She looked at him for a long moment, her expression blank, before cutting her gaze back out the main viewport at the bright blur of hyperspace. “I assume this is what people mean when they talk about happiness,” she said with a shrug, then turned to go. “I’m going to change,” she called over her shoulder. “Drop your snowsuits in the hold and I’ll stash them all away.”

“She’s happy, don’t worry,” Bodhi said when she’d gone. “She smiles a lot more than she used to.”

“So do you,” Cassian replied, pitching his voice as neutral as possible.

But Bodhi just laughed. “Yeah, I do. ‘Cause I’m happy.” He directed his wide grin Cassian’s direction for half a second before turning back to the controls. Bodhi seemed to be all eyes or all smile, and Cassian genuinely wasn’t sure which was the more distracting. 

“Are you happy, Cass?” he asked after a long moment of silence.

Cassian shrugged with one shoulder. “I never stop to think about it.”

“Well, you should,” Bodhi replied, his tone confident. “You deserve to be happy, too.” Coordinates for their next jump programmed in, Bodhi stood and untangled himself from the nav computer, gripping Cassian’s shoulder briefly as he made his way past him and through the doorway Jyn had just disappeared through, back towards the crew quarters. 

Cassian took his time completing the origin wipe in the navigation computer, wrapped in the quiet hum and familiar rumble of their ship in hyperspace. He wasn’t sure he knew what happiness was, if he was honest with himself. He understood hope, and dedication to a purpose, victory in the face of impossible odds, but happiness seemed too nebulous a term to apply to his life. Still, whispered a quiet corner of his mind, it had to mean something that he was willing to shoulder the stress of having them with him to keep Jyn and Bodhi safe. He had lost too many friends over too many years of war, but never before had he felt this visceral need to put himself between them and danger.

Happiness was hearing Kaytoo’s voice again on Scarif, after the droid had sacrificed himself to save them. Happiness was Jyn’s expression when he told her _ welcome home_. Happiness was Bodhi’s smile.

Cassian abandoned that line of thought, finished the origin wipe, and went to change into his off-base kit.


End file.
